I win!

30 blog posts in 30 days. I succeeded at the Artfully Wild Blog Along! 

I realize that this is not only the first time I've completed any 30-day challenge--not even one day skipped!--it may well be the first time I've completed any do-something-every-day-for-a-limited-duration challenge. On the one hand, keeping it low pressure with totally 0 expectations for quality definitely helped. On the other hand, I imagined if I did persist with this challenge and actually write something every day it might get me in the zone & energize some other projects that need to be written/completed, and on that front ... not so much. Sure, I accomplished (or made moderate forward progress on) some things this month, but there are plenty of other things that are still notably undone.

I finished Educated by Tara Westover last night (or early this morning, actually; those who said it would keep you up reading to find out what's next were right!). It's a very well crafted memoir of a woman who grew up in an abusive, fringey survivalist family, and what happens . There are parts, particularly talking about her early years on the mountain, that actually have a bit of a Laura Ingalls Wilder vibe -- and yet Westover is 5 years younger than me. 

Still reading & enjoying Trickster Makes This World. I'm definitely not finishing Best American Poetry 2020 this month, but I do still plan to finish it. For fiction, I started The Conductors by Nicole Glover, a historical fantasy set in Reconstruction-era Philadelphia. The main characters are magicians, but they're also former slaves and Underground Railroad conductors. (This is another really lovely cover, too.)

I probably won't keep trying to blog every day (there are things I'd rather do, and also things I ought to do), but I may post a bit more frequently. After all, in the last 30 days, I've almost doubled the output of this blog, which has been hypothetically "active" for 13 years. So, I'll close this post by saying:

Congratulations to me!

and

Happy (Early) Beltaine!

Poem In Your Pocket

It's Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day! (I wonder why it's so late this year--one of the most fun parts of National Poetry Month should be earlier in the month, I think.) It's hard to celebrate this year, as I'm going nowhere (maybe I'll get some takeout for dinner, but I still won't leave my car) and, also, my pants don't have pockets. Still, I can at least post some poems here!

I don't know that I've found a poem in The Best American Poetry 2020 that I'd pocket. (Julian Gewirtz' "To X (Written On This Device You Made") is too long.) I realized I hadn't yet posted a cover pic of the collection, though, and thought this was a good opportunity to do so. Fencers are always cool, right? 

One of my favorite poems to use as a pocket poem is Yehuda Amichai's "The Ballad of the Washed Hair." (I think Lilith is using Chana Bloch's translation, but I'm not sure.) I don't why exactly I find this poem so compelling. I do like long hair. There's the mix of the personal and the historical, the mundane and the mythical. The girl is objectified (or at least eroticized) but she's also powerful, and not just in terms of sex appeal. (It's a rare example of a positive Delilah figure.) I love "The scent of her drying hair/is prophesying in the streets and among stars." There's a blend of melancholy and hope. It's also a good pocket poem because it's relatively short. I wonder, though, how much of the poem's resonance comes from that final image. What will readers for whom telephone books were never a daily reality think of the poem--would the ending seem flat to Eliot? What will Bernadette or Edie think if they read this poem as young women? (And how will awareness of events and realities in the Middle East color future readings? This is one of Amichai's less political poems, but I always carry an awareness of him as an Israeli poet.)

Ha, I've linked to this poem at Lilith before and never read the others in the "Hair and Desire" feature. "I'm Letting It Grow" by Nancy Blotter is pretty fun.

If I had pockets, I could pocket some of the poems I mentioned in my Tree Poems post.

If I was going to pocket a recent poetic read, it would be something from Lucy Biederman's The Walmart Book of the Dead. (The publisher calls it "experimental fiction"; they're prose poems to me.) I came across this book in one of those authors-recommend-books-by-other-authors articles (I think this one was by Kiley Reid of the intense Such a Fun Age), and I knew I had to read it. That juxtaposition of the mundane and the mythic that I appreciate in "Ballad of the Washed Hair"? It's here on steroids: the cosmic and the commonplace. Titles and subjects are inspired by The Egyptian Book of the Dead, but the details, characters, and scenarios are drawn from contemporary American Walmart and Walmart patrons. There's humour and absurdity, but it's generally not at the characters' expense; these are, indeed, life and death issues at play in the Walmart setting, and they deserve the attention. You can see an example, the "SPELL for Making One Not Have to Work in the Gods' Domain" here. It's actually not my favorite from the book, partly because there's less of the juxtaposition with language from the Papyrus of Ani and partly because I feel the portrait of this individual is a little more negative/less empathetic than most others in the book.

"ROLL of Gods," for example, uses more of that antiquated language, along with some very relatable humour:

O broad gods of the hall of truth, I have ascended unto you, I am among you, here, I live on truth, truth like you, and I know your names--

O patron of the only independent bookstore in a two-hundred-mile radius, I have not wasted my time. ...

O invader of Iraq, who came forth from the boardroom, I have not worn someone else's boots. ...

O grocery store cheque writer, who made longer the endless line, who came forth from the gods' domain, I have not rammed my cart against the cart in front of it, creating a riot. ...

"SPELL to Enter Through the Gates of Night" demonstrates a perhaps radical empathy:

 ...ILLUSTRATION: The part of the wall that holds the guns in Walmart throbs, as if lit differently than anything else on earth, constructed from different particles. People on the other side don't understand. Either that, or they turn away, fearing that, in their heart of hearts, they do. ... A weightlifter since high school, he hadn't know anything could be so heavy until he held a gun for the first time. It was a Sig Sauer--just a simple, double action handgun, it hadn't even been loaded. He felt the desire to die when he held it, and, buzzing right alongside that desire, the means to do so. And when he pulled himself back from choosing to use it like that, the choice he had made felt as physical a thing as pulling a hood from his head. ...

If I was making a pocket pick, it might be "SPELL for Hopefulness in the Gods' Domain," about a Walmart security officer. "Initially, he was hesitant to accept this job, but not because he thought it might involve becoming a father-figure-type to a bunch of kids whose families live in cars. If he had known that all this extra emotional stuff would be involved, he never would have taken the job." It's tragicomic.

Under the Radar

Man, I got sucked in by Biden's speech and almost forgot to post today. (Not bad, but I think I coulda stuck with Googling the transcript tomorrow. I'd give it a B+ and I'll upgrade that to an A if any of those major pieces of legislation pass in the next two months.) No longer in the mood for writing up anything lengthy.

I've read and reviewed a number of YA novels here. Most of them seem to have gotten a fair amount of fanfare (blog tours, social media mentions, banner ads on book websites, strategic Listicle placement, etc.), but I've encountered a few that seemed to slip largely under the radar. Two of those are Isle of Blood and Stone and Song of the Abyss by Makiia Lucier. Sure, there are some things about these books that are formulaic, but like a good rock song, sometimes all you want is a formula well executed. And, in fact, these books do also put some variation into the formula.

The fantasy world of Isle of Blood and Stone seemed reminiscent of Portugal in the Age of Explorers, with a nobility invested in trade, seafaring, and map-making. The writer is from Guam, and I suspect aspects of that heritage make their way into the worldbuilding of the island kingdom of St. John del Mar (although I really don't know enough about the history of Guam--I didn't even know it was colonized by Spain until I Googled after reading this series.)The book follows two young nobles--Elias, whose mapmaker father was killed years ago when the two heirs to throne were abducted and murdered, and Mercedes, an orphaned noblewoman of mixed ancestry who currently serves as diplomat and spy. When a map with a hidden riddle is discovered, it raises questions: could Elias' father and the lost princes be alive after all? who was really behind the abduction, and is there a traitor in the palace?

Sure, there are tropes, including it sometimes stretching the belief that two young nobles, basically alone, are entrusted with the investigations and adventures. (Also, in terms of worldbuilding, there are a few objectionable throw-away details, like a casual reference to cannibalism.) But Lucier does a good job of maintaining tension and keeping up the mystery; though it's fairly obvious there is a traitor, the older adult characters are drawn sympathetically yet leaving room for suspicion (and I had at least one surprise). Elias and Mercedes are likable, and there's a real sense of history to the setting. 

So why doesn't this book get more buzz? Does it fall into a common pattern of writers of color receiving less publisher support than white writers? Did it get a big publisher book but (surely at least somewhat outside the target audience) just missed it? The treachery and the encounter with a leper may be a bit darker than the content of some YA books--but honestly not that much; such an argument would be a real stretch. I don't know why I hadn't heard of it before it showed up in my "you might also like" scrolling, but I found Isle of Blood and Stone to be a refreshingly enjoyable read.

I don't think Song of the Abyss is quite as strong as its predecessor, but given the importance of seafaring to St. John del Mar, it's nice to have a book that gives us a voyage. There's a time jump, so Song follows a minor character from Isle, now grown up and an aspiring mapmaker herself. There's piracy, diplomacy, and a journey to a mysterious distant land (which evokes China, including a fantasy take on the terra cotta army). It's also a lot of fun!

Literati

I'm usually a serial monogamist as a reader, but I do often make an exception for nonfiction, taking slower read of a nonfiction tome, coming to it intermittently between novels. My nonfiction this month has been Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde (and, in fact, I thought I'd have gotten further with it before now because the Trickster subject matter really appeals to me; I think I've just had some especially quick/binge-worthy fiction reads lately keeping me away).

In Trickster, Hyde takes an approach that draws from anthropology, literary and art criticism, biology, psychoanalysis, and more. He discusses the archetype of the trickster, the trickster role in myth, and modern and contemporary artists who have tapped into some of the trickster energy. There's a focus on Hermes, but Coyote and Raven from Native American traditions and Eshu and Legba from West African traditions also get ample discussion. Monkey from Journey to the West gets some mention as do Loki and Krishna. Hyde is a compelling writer, erudite in associations yet employing a conversational, often humorous vernacular.

In the first section of the book, Hyde discusses the Trickster as a figure tied to appetite (yet one who can, in many cases, delay gratification in order to better fulfill more spiritual appetites and desires). Next, he delves into the chaotic aspects of Trickster and the role of chance/accident (and, indeed, change) in maintaining a meaningful existence. This includes discussion of John Cage's aleatoric composition and Yoruba divination practices. Hyde goes on to discuss Trickster in terms of shame, shamelessness, and obscenity, tying him to Jung's shadow. The discussion of shame culture and its disruption includes a focus on the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, and Allen Ginsburg. I'm just starting the fourth section on Trickster and the trap of culture, but I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. 

(I'm also looking forward to the appendices, which include Hyde's own translation of a Homeric hymn and a discussion of trickster and gender. I don't know that I'll fully agree with the latter analysis, but I appreciate that it's there. I'm also intrigued by Hyde's earlier book, The Gift; while Trickster, Hyde discusses the windfall of gift of Hermes/fortune that can disrupt fate and social order (and how art can play this role), he includes a note that The Gift discusses how a gift economy (and the imaginative work of artists) can create a social order. It makes me think of the gift/favour economy described in All Our Kin, a work of anthropology that had a real impact on my thinking. Trickster Makes This World took several years to write and was first published in 1998, so it's dated in some ways while eerily relevant in a few others--just this year, for instance, I've seen it referenced by Tressie McMillan Cottom.)

Trickster Makes This World was a Literati Joseph Campbell book club selection. I've been quite pleased with the book club picks. Although it's not cheap, at $20 a month it's not that much more than buying a full-price book (which is, frankly, not something I do all that often anymore). Some highlights have been the first pick, The Wayfinders, essays by anthropologist Wade Davis; Circe, a novel I'd heard good things about but just hadn't quite picked up until it landed on my doorstep; and The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, a graphic novel that explores storytelling, feminism, and Scheherazade.

And Literati offers me the opportunity to do an unboxing blog post! Here's May's book, which arrived in the mail this week, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abraham, a nonfiction selection that looks to focus on perception. Although I have to admit, I'm ready for some more fiction, this does look interesting; the chapter titles (such as "Animism and the Alphabet") also intrigue. A quibble, though: there are almost three pages of blurbs in the front of the book, many of them interesting, and 13 of the 16 are from men, only 2 from women. This probably reflects publishing norms in general and not just the author/publishers/readership of this particular book, but it definitely suggests a blind spot. 

A Summoning of Demons

While my thirsty, still unpotted daisies probably wish I had been doing other things, I finished A Summoning of Demons. I appreciate Berg's/Glass' ability to keep tension in a slower-than-thriller-paced book, but I have to admit this one had me feeling teased at points. Enough with half-remembered memories and dreams! Like Livia, a new character in this book, perhaps a fantasy take on Copernicus or Gallileo--I just want some knowledge. I want to know what's up with those sniffers.

Mild spoilers to follow:

As to sniffers, my long-brewing anticipation is satisfied. Their origins are mostly revealed. We learn more--but not everything--about Teo. About Placidio? A few more hints dropped, but his past has yet to be revealed. While some mysteries are (at least partially) resolved, and there's a few turning points for Romy, especially in the final scene, that could suggest the end of a series, it's the mystery of Placidio above all that makes me hope for further Chimera books. Not only do I want to know all the details of his past identity or identities (my read of the clues has me thinking he was born heir to Ricci; does that mean the current Grand Duc is also the son of an islander?), but I'm kind of shipping Romy & Placidio. On the one hand, it could be nice to have a series where romance isn't the primary thing on the female protagonist's mind and doesn't dominate the central relationships ... on the other hand, I'm in camp Romidio. Plomy?

Just Checking Off a Box

Really not much to write about today. Still reading Cate Glass' A Summoning of Demons. Spent most of the day down the River, mostly hanging in the back cottage despite a few strolls down to the pier. I'd thought the tide might be at the lowest today or tomorrow, but the wind picked up (even if the rain had stopped by the time I woke up), so we didn't see the dramatic lows of Friday and Saturday. After watching a couple of the "fairytale" episodes of The Crown Season 4, Momma and I thought we'd watch something a little lighter and ended up binging the first season of Glow Up, a British reality competition show about aspiring makeup artists. It was fun; I would not have predicted the last three from the early episodes. The judging seemed fair overall despite a couple of major wrong calls (according to me, of course), and it was nice to see both the main judges and especially the guest judges giving supportive if constructive feedback to most of the group most of the time. I was a little worried the finale was going to make me want to boycott future seasons, but I'm content with the winner, so maybe at some point we'll venture into Season 2.

When I got home, Amazon had delivered Hither, Page by Cat Sebastian. I've enjoyed her queer Regency romances, so I anticipate I'll like this one as well, though it's a bit of a departure, being set in postwar Britain. I'll probably work this one into my reading schedule in a couple of weeks, although perhaps I should wait a bit since the next in the series is due out later this year. I think, though, that "late fall" is too long to wait to read a book that advertises itself as "Agatha Christie but make it gay!"

Followed Through

I finished A Conjuring of Assassins. There were some slow parts, but things sure built to a dramatic finish.

And I finished the journal page I gesso'd last night with a spring tree:

Painting in the Back Cottage

I took the day off & got down to the River quite a bit earlier than usual. It was pretty nippy when I arrived, so I only read on the pier for about 45 minutes (I may have gotten a bit of a red neck, though, despite flipping my cloak up as a scarf). So, I quickly retreated to the back cottage where I unpacked some of my art supplies (mostly from the last few Let's Make Art journal boxes). Instead of starting an LMA project, though, I ended up playing around and doing something original on the page opposite my "AWAKE" journal jam.

I originally thought I'd do something with more layers, maybe a little masking or filling in the face with flesh tones, but I got impatient and also kind of liked my paintbrush outline with the marine acrylic. And after dinner (a great spicy peanut noodles dish supplied by Blue Apron and cooked by Momma), I put down some gesso to dry overnight with an intention to work on the LMA April tree spread tomorrow.

My plan is to paint a spring tree with wisteria (I was thinking of this tree near the 301 Chik-fil-a--the wisteria was already fading after being so bold just a few days before), but we'll see how the actual color mixing and painting go.

My front yard tree at home would also make a cool model for tree branches.

Spring Is In the Air

 We're in that short window of time when things in my yard are actually blooming.

The dogwood and the azaleas around the front oak tree are actually slightly past their peak, though the azaleas next to the house are just getting started. In the shade garden by my side door, the lungwort is still looking good, as is my little Amethyst Ice primrose. There are lily of the valley blooming by the side of the house (although they're supposed to be naturalizing and the only place they seem to want to spread is into the driveway); we'll see if they last 'til May Day. Most of my irises are showing color at the tops of their buds, and they don't seem to be bothered by the current cold-dipping-toward-frost snap. Dracula's Kiss has bloomed.

I'm still reading A Conjuring of Assassins; the only art I've done today is to watch the April lagniappe for Let's Make Art journaling. It's Earth Day, though, so I think a post that's basically just yard pictures counts as appropriate and not slacking. 

Chimera Book Two

An Illusion of Thieves wrapped up well, with an ending that would be in acceptable but that fully set up there is more to come. (I suppose I'll avoid spoilers for that last chapter.) In fact, Glass' author bio at the end of the novel does a good job of characterizing the series; Glass, it says, is "a writer of fantasy adventure novels" who "also dabble from time to time in epic fantasy." Indeed, while some of the set-up hinted at in Thieves, especially about the history of the gods and magic, suggested a series that is headed to epic places, the last chapter suggested instead a new caper or adventure--a "next mission" approach rather than a "continuing to develop this story." There's a parallel with TV series that episodic versus serialized. The "next adventure" model leans episodic, but as we know from TV, there's a large ground of semi-serialized, "have your cake and eat it, too" territory. From the opening of A Conjuring of Assassins, Book Two in the Chimera series seems to fall squarely in this semi-serialized bucket. Romy and her accomplishes have accepted the new mission revealed at the end of Thieves, but Romy has also already had a troubling dream that suggests some epic secrets about the origins of magic will be revealed.

Placidio is looking pretty good on that cover. I'm about a quarter into Conjuring, and it's been pretty eventful. I'm not sorry this is a somewhat slower read than my recent batch of romances. I don't need to be reading a book every night. Maybe the Chimera trilogy will even last me through the weekend!

Every so often I'll Google (OK, or Amazon search) an author I haven't read anything from in a while, just to check that I haven't missed any new released, or sometimes to let the Algorithm suggest something with a similar mood to me. Not long ago, I searched for Carol Berg and was surprised to see a YA-ish trilogy by Cate Glass cropping up in the results. It turns out Glass is a pen name for Berg, and An Illusion of Thieves, published by Tor, is the first of her new Chimera trilogy. Like other Berg books, the setting is rich (Renaissance-Italy-inspired but with a backdrop of forbidden magic and a historic natural disaster that turned the boot into an archipelago) and you get a real sense of milieu. I'd say the pace is a bit quicker than typical Berg, and the protagonist seems perhaps a bit more worldly. Her situation changes dramatically in the opening scenes, and the book follows her re-establishing herself, then getting drawn into a high-stakes caper. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all turns out, but I'm even more curious about what might come in the sequels--inter-city warfare? religious revival? an artifact-hunting expedition? I'll find out soon. 

The Mermaid, The Witch, & The Sea

Random but notable: It hailed this morning. Emphatically. Hail the size of hominy (smallish hominy, but still).

Relevant to book blogging: The Mermaid, The Witch, And The Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is an enjoyable YA fantasy (with another very lovely cover, this one illustrated by Victo Ngai). It's set in a world ruled by the expanding Nipran Empire (apparently mostly modeled on historical Japan, although there are some elements that suggest Britain's colonial history). Evelyn Hasegawa is the daughter of noble but indebted parents who learns she has been promised in marriage to an Imperial officer and will be a "coffin girl," sent overseas to a colony with her possessions packed in her own coffin. Flora, or Florian, is a reluctant pirate on the Dove, which books passengers in port only to turn slaver at sea. The first part of the book does a good job of establishing Evelyn and Florian as characters and building their relationship, with Evelyn unaware  of the danger she's in. After Flora and Evelyn escape the Dove, the change of setting and storyline at first seems abrupt, but the pieces start to come together as the two learn more about themselves and about those left behind on the Dove. Parts of the final two sections seem rushed, but there is plenty of action and adventure. The book has a unique take on mermaids, and the role of the Sea is well handled.

Hear Me Roar

OK, still not feeling like a long blog post--though the Bromance books are fun and deserve a write-up (I finished the third, Crazy Stupid Bromance today). Instead, I thought I'd mention something else I've been reading this weekend (besides romance novels and magazines): the guidebook for artist M.J. Cullinane's ROAR oracle card deck. I bought the deck primarily for the art. ROAR is filled with portraits of notable woman--I'm not adding photos here for copyright reasons, but if you're reading this, you should definitely check out the art on Cullinane's website, because it is beautiful. (I don't know exactly how she creates the images, many of them based on photos--digital collage?)

There are familiar figures who drew me to the deck--including authors such as Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, and Mary Shelley. There's a strong representation of women associated with New Age and spiritualist movements, including Pamela Colman Smith, who I learned just this year was the illustrator and co-designer of the "Rider-Waite" (now often known as "Smith-Waite." or "Waite-Smith" or "Rider-Waite-Smith") tarot deck. Perhaps most intriguing to me are the figures who are new or virtually new to me, like Wild West mail carrier "Stagecoach" Mary Fields; Maud Wagner, first known female tattoist in the U.S.; and Ida Lewis, lighthouse keeper known for her lifesaving rescues (she now has a U.S. Coast Guard cutter for a namesake). 

Saturday Night Post

Oh, I'm really not in the blogging mood. I'm not necessarily in an anti-blogging mood, though, so it'd be a shame to break my streak. I'm reading the third of a fresh series of romances, which I'll probably write about tomorrow or later next week. My other main reading today was periodicals, including flipping through the latest Eating Well, which apparently ate Cooking Light about a year ago. I'm not wild about the switch (the paper quality has gone done, for instance), although it hasn't been as bad as I feared. This issue isn't packed with too many recipes I'd like to try, although there's an interesting article on ethically sourced spices from Vietnam that includes an intriguing pork satay recipe as well as a roasted potato recipe that looks a little involved (it's basically a much more complicated version of a shake-n-bake) but still yummy. 

Spoiler Alert

I had actually started a novella but just wasn't gelling with its mood, so I started Spoiler Alert. I think this had probably come up in my recommendations before, but I was spurred to order it in part by a positive review from K.J. Dell'Antonia, author of The Chicken Sisters. Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade is a fangirl romance, much in the spirit of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl or Conventionally Yours, another recent read. Spoiler Alert is perhaps an even more literal fan fantasy, since it includes a celebrity romance--the female protagonist, April, is a fanfic writer and shipper of Lavinia and Aeneas from vaguely classically inspired cable fantasy megahit Gods of the Gates, which just finished filming its final season. When she posts a cosplay picture on Twitter and receives some online harassment for daring to post a plus-size photo, she's contacted by the show's Aeneas, who asks her out to dinner. But is it all just a PR stunt?

The most fun of this book is the not-so-thinly-veiled snark directed toward Game of Thrones and its final seasons. Finding the parallels between Gods and Game is amusing; the male protagonist, Marcus Caster-Rupp, is clearly a Nikolaj Coster-Waldau type. Well, who can blame April or Olivia there? (By the middle of the book, we're starting to see potential pairings among Marcus' former castmates, so Dade is clearly planning a series.) There's more fun from the fanfic snippets interspersed between chapters, as well as occasional script segments from Marcus' previous, not-exactly-A-list roles (the chef in love with his "sweet spicy sous chef"; the ineffectual scientist in Sharkphoon; the eponymous sea creature in Manmaid). 

Another winning feature of Spoiler Alert is that both parties have interesting conflicts and back stories--there's drama among Marcus' caste mates as he vacillates over what to do next and whether to drop his pretty-but-dumb media person. April's a geologist and amateur costume designer, nervous about showing her true self to the fan community, and hurt by the sudden absence of her best fandom friend and beta reader. Both have deep unresolved conflicts with their parents (and, given the characters are in their late 30s, this felt both cringeworthy and satisfying). Because there are so many threads and we see both April's and Marcus' point of view, the action of the book is face-paced, leading up to a finale at the big Convention that's definitely worth the price of admission. 

Tree Poems

I was thinking of working on this Let's Make Art journaling project and think about text I might include if I made it a two-page spread. Of course, I thought of Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay," which I love but wasn't feeling for this. Someone in the Facebook group used Mary Oliver, a good choice. 

Anyway, the Googling led me to "Arbolé, Arbolé" by Federico Garcia Lorca. (And, hey, I just figured out how to do accents in Blogger.) I haven't read it before, and I really like it! It's romantic; the lyrics could be a folk song. (I don't know Spanish, but I like the rhythm of the translation by William Bryant Logan. I have to image "Come on over, muchacha" sounded a little less skeevy when originally written/translated, but I think the hint of skeeviness still works--after all, we know what those riders and bullfighters and flower-bedecked travelers are after.) I don't know enough about Lorca and Spanish history to know if the "dry and green" olive tree landscape represents a different region of Spain from those represented by the men, or if the pretty girl is a more general figure for Spain. On the personal or non-figurative level, I like a girl who doesn't need a man to entertain or define her: enjoy the single life, muchacha. 

I might have to read some more Lorca, either after I finish Best American Poetry 2020 or interspersed with that reading. 

Other poetic Googling: on the theme of "impermanence," there just aren't too many flowers are quickly here-and-gone as the wisteria. It's still lovely, but what I see along the road has already faded from the hues of a few days ago. My research turned up some interesting poems, but I think my favorite is "Extreme Wisteria" by Lucie Brock-Broido. 

But is it really a gauntlet?

Phoenix Rising, Havenfall's sequel was a quick read. Still fun, though some of the encounters/decisions didn't make a lot of sense. I actually wish the pacing was slower--although the book does introduce one intriguing new major character, the characters are pretty much the same as Book 1-- because some of the conflicts are interesting and could benefit from nuance. For example, the novel opens on Maddie fishing for information from guests at a Havenfall ball and there are tantalizing details mentioned (giant eagles, Fiorden family histories) that seem to be set up but are instead mostly dropped; when a higher-stakes undercover mission comes up later, the protagonists pretty much go straight for the main suspect and find what they're looking for in one night. Taya is notably missing for most of the book but arrives in time for the climax with basically "I'll tell you about it later" (but not in this book, apparently) as the explanation for her sojourn in an entirely different, long-forbidden world. On the plus side, there are giant wolf puppies (and we could have used more time with them, too!).

My main annoyance with this book, and it is not a minor annoyance, is that there is a significant magic item that is referred to as a "gauntlet" throughout despite, although not described in huge detail, the details given suggesting it is a VAMBRACE, bracer, armguard, wristguard, or cuff rather than a gauntlet. (The item is described as a "delicate tapered cylinder of gold" that "flares at the end, shaped and sized for a wrist. It looks like finely wrought armor, opening on tiny hinges and closing with a delicate latch.") A gauntlet is not a cylinder; it is a glove. Nothing in the description suggests this item has fingers or even protects on set of knuckles. It is consistently described as being worn on the wrist; other characters check Maddie's wrist to see if she is wearing it on more than one occasion. (Also, this delicate cylinder apparently fastens just fine around a female human's wrist and a male Fierden's wrist, to name two, no problem.) Now. some Internet research does turn up some "demi-gauntlets" that don't have fingers or cover the full fingers--but they still cover at least the first set of knuckles. Wikipedia asserts that "In Western women's fashion, a gauntlet can refer to an extended cuff with little or no hand covering. Such gauntlets are sometimes worn by brides at weddings." I question this, but even so, choosing an obscure fashion usage over the more common armor usage in a fantasy with plenty of medieval weaponry gets major side-eye from me. There's one stray mention of the gauntlet extending to the palm; I don't know how that works for actually using one's hand. If this item is partly made of chain rather than plate, nothing in the description suggests it. I maintain that the phoenix flame gauntlet is a vambrace.

So, not a flawless book by any means, but the characters are still likable, and it's exciting to travel outside of Havenfall in this installment. If there are more in the series, I'll read them. I may not rush out to buy them in hardcover ... but then, sometimes you just want something fun, and the covers are quite pretty. (In this case, the back cover, showing a fuller landscape with gardens, is lovely as well and shows how the front cover is a collaboration between the illustrator and the jacket designer.)

Lighter Fare

I  was looking for something a little more fun, and indeed Havenfall by Sara Holland is. A YA fantasy with elements of mystery and romance, Havenfall is set at a secret Colorado inn and mountain retreat that just happens to be the neutral zone of the multiverse. There are two main Adjacent Realms that still visit earth, or Haven, regularly--wintery Fierden and Byrn, plagued by storms of elemental magic--and there's a satisfying sense of history in the novel's worldbuilding. When her innkeeper uncle is struck down in a magical attack and a guest of the Inn is murdered, teen Maddie Morrow must step into the role of Innkeeper and peacekeeper between rival delegations. Not all is starlight and poetry--in the world outside the Inn, Maddie's mother is on death row, falsely (she believes) accused of murdering her brother when Maddie was only five, while at the Inn itself, not all of the guests are who they appear to be. Some of the plot points are predictable; there's a bit too much overlooking of the obvious and some of the secret-keeping is excessive and seems contrived to further the plot, but the book is still a fun read that leaves lots to explore in the sequel(s). I hope we get to hear some of that Fierden poetry.

I'm pleased at making it to Day 12 of the Blog Along, and I'm pleased with the page I made this afternoon, taking a break to journal jam with Effy Wild. I went my own more or less,  starting from the initial prompts of "overlapping circles," "red," and "use pretty tape."

On a less unmitigatedly happy note, I finished The Changeling by Kate Horsley tonight. Horsley's work was recommended to me by a teacher I train with. I looked her up and was surprised I hadn't heard of her before: theoretically, it's exactly my jam. Confessions of a Pagan Nun is set in fifth century Ireland; the writer Gwynneve (the novel is in the style of a recovered and translated medieval manuscript) is one of the monastics (or cele de) at Brigid's church, but she was trained as a Druid. The best part of the book is the imagining of what pre- and early-Christian Ireland was like, from life in a tuath (not glamorous and most involving pig tending, although tales are still told of the deaths in skirmish of Gwynneve's grandfather and great-aunt). Gwynneve's mother is a member of the woman's council, a healer and collector of herbs, and Gwynneve learns from her but becomes fascinated by the Druid Giannon and his great power of literacy (as well as the traditional Druidic power of satire). The novel tells of Gwynneve's childhood, her training as a nun, and her adventures in young adulthood as the traditional order regulated by wandering Druids comes under assault by the worldview of Christian monks (particularly those in the Augustinian mode as opposed to the more pleasure-loving and tolerant Pelagians). This coming-of-age story is intercut with scenes from the monastic community at Kildare, which becomes troubled by extremism and conflicting ideaologies.

The downside of The Changeling is that it's pretty bleak. Life is hard, and it isn't fair. Gwynneve, like many spiritual seekers, tries to understand and explain this. Her teacher, Giannon, is accused of rejecting both the old ways of Druidry (and magic he dismisses as trickery) as well as the new doctrines of Christianity, though he embraces knowledge in many forms. Gwynneve finds her solace mostly in the natural world, but also in writing; although in her Confession, she attests the official party line that Pelagian Christianity's doctrine of original grace and lack of asceticism are heresy, it is clear that she disagrees, In the main, The Changeling is perhaps primarily a philosophical text (it's published by Shambhala press; though I could occasional elements of Buddhist philosophy in Gwynneve's ruminations on suffering, they felt more Epicurean or Stoic to me) with passages like:

    And what message would I have wanted from the stars that night when I wandered motherless for the first time in my life? What message would I want the sky to tell me on any night? That I am loved? That I am protected? That something understands my efforts though they fail? That the sky is a curtain behind which all that we long for waits, that all the dreams we mourn that are held in the arms of the dead, who wait and whisper like children in a game of hiding? That if I have faith I will be embraced by an understanding that is complete and blissful? Perhaps if one stops looking up at the stars and looks instead at this world, the messages we need would be there and the gods could tend to larger matters than one tiny person's sorrow.
    I did not know and still do not know what message would give me the greatest comfort, for all signs in the end seem to be desperate interpretations by those who must have some explanation for the pain of living.

Overall, Confessions is rather bleak, although Gwynneve does take her own journey and claim her own choices, even when her options seem limited. The Changeling is set nearly ten centuries later, still very invested in the . It starts out promising, with the birth of young Grey to the Finnistuath goatherd and his wife, raised as a boy out of fear the goatherd would expose or beat to death yet another girlchild--okay, not exactly a barrel of laughs (especially when you add in a few scenes with the abusive English Lord and his sons and the casually callous and violent local Priest), but then it takes bleak to a new level--including Grey being pimped by an unscrupulous monk and lengthy visceral descriptions of the Black Plague. It's one thing to try to capture a historic mindset or to confront the hardships of life head-on without a false or easy positivity; it's another to envision a world without pleasures (except, in this case, rolling the grass, eating cheese, and--clearly dominating many characters' minds--sex). There's the occasional song, but I was three-quarters through the book and reading about a world where it seemed no one had a drum or a whistle or ever picked berries or baked fruit or distilled whiskey. Time passes; life happens; things start looking up (at least for Grey; and we get mention of a drum and flute and brewed ale) and I started to imagine the book might actually have a happy ending, but (spoiler alert) those hopes were pretty much dashed. Still, the book ends on what in this context seems a relatively hopeful note: the closing sentences, "Sometimes she was a warrior, though she still didn't know what her true cause as a warrior was. Perhaps it was simply living each day without succumbing to bitter sorrow over the pain of being human; perhaps it was fighting to savor what one has and to honor what one has lost."

In Under the Wire

Well, after dinner & a couple of episodes of The Crown, I nearly forgot about updating the blog. I could skip today, but I feel like keeping the momentum going even if I don't feel much like writing.

So, I'll be brief. Instead of writing about books today, maybe I'll share my recent listening. Shortly after getting my second vaccine shot, I went down some algorithmic rabbit holes and ended up ordering several CDs. (The timing was not deliberate, but in fact, as I've been out & about just a bit more most-vaccination, I've had more opportunities for listening in the car. Even though my pre-pandemic commute was pretty short, I find I do miss the music. I mean, sure I could play music around the house more often; I just don't, especially as I'm still in mourning for my defunct iPod nano. Maybe at some point I'll get in a trip to the Apple store in hopes of resurrection.) I won't talk for now about the albums that seemed disappointing or mediocre (in fact, none of this year's purchases would make the desert island list), but I'll mention the two I've been enjoying most:

The Green World by Dar Williams. While it isn't going to displace Mortal City as my favorite Dar album, it grows on me more with each listen. I bought this primarily because the song "Calling the Moon" was recommended by Effy Wild. It's a good track, but my favorite is "After All." I noticed more Christian references in the lyrics than in the albums I'd heard before, including in a song that pays tribute to the Berrigan brothers, anti-war protestors. And "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono" is fun--even though it prompted me to look for YouTube videos of Ono singing (I've never been a fan of Ono-bashing, especially as most of it is blatantly misogynistic, but the Ono music left me ... unimpressed).

We Are by Jon Batiste. I enjoy seeing Batiste on A Late Show on the rare occasions I stay up for it (and although the music snippets are usually tiny), and I also enjoyed watching the movie Soul, which Batiste consulted on. This album has a strong element of New Orleans brass, a sense of community (I didn't realize the opening track included members of the Batiste's high school's marching band until I saw this interview online, a cool detail; I also appreciate how he rejects genre pigeon-holing in the interview),and a variety of moods. Some of the tracks like "Boy Hood" have more of a rap/spoken word vibe than I prefer--but it also has some really nice instrumentals (and to me there's actually something about the spoken sections that remind me of Van Morrison's setting of the "When the child was a child" poem from Winds of Desire). My favorite track is the ebullient "Freedom."

The Best American Poetry 2020, Part 3

In Vievee Francis' "The Shore," the speaker observes a couple at a hotel and reflects on her own affairs and others'. The language is vivid. I really need to read her book, Forest Primeval, which is upstairs either on my desk or on the poetry bookshelves.

Some of the other poems in this small batch touch on similar themes. In "Sex," Christine Gosnay writes, "... I can't help closing my eyes to imagines/ the boat that carries me to the middle/ of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds." Rachel Galvin's "Little Death" describes, in intense and sometimes violent detail the catching of a fish. (The poem's--subtitle? epigraph?--is "after Jonathas de Andrade"; in the notes, Galvin says she wrote the poem after watching the Brazilian artist's film O Peixe; I saw some of this work at Richmond's ICA and it is indeed striking and memorable.) Despite its tight descriptive focus, Galvin's poem packs a punch: "Remember: when a man captures a fish/ he will seduce it while he slaughters it".

I didn't care for "Birches Are the Gods' Favorite Tree" by Regan Good. Some visceral images emerge, particularly in the poem's latter half, but the dense language, classical allusions, and intellectual diction makes the balance feel off to me. In her contributor note, Good writes, "The randomness of suffering and grief is at the heart of the poem. ... It is not really bearable, but we bear it."

In a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style, Jorie Graham's "It Cannot Be" foregrounds the suffering of refugees, mixing and blending with the personal (the death of Graham's mother) and the impersonal (an implacable sea, the prospect of "extinction"). 

The most powerful poem in this section, for me, was Julian Gewirtz' longer, multi-part "To X (Written on This Device You Made)." The epigraph quotes a newspaper article about a "24-year-old migrant worker" who jumped out of the window of a Chinese factory dormitory run by iPhone manufacturer Foxconn. The poem begins with an iPhone: "Pick it up./ Black glass our mirror when it's/off but it is never/off." It continues:

I see you I think I
see you load your 
poem onto it, into me, into now     Did you, just like that, standing
fall asleep Did you fall farther than you meant Did you
mean me to be reading this I want
to touch the sky/ feel that blueness so light/
but I can't do
any of this/ so I'm
leaving this
world/ I was fine
when I came/ and fine when I 
left     In this blue touchlight
fine rain starts
scrolling down

The "you" throughout the poem is tricky--usually, it seems, the dead worker, but sometimes the phone itself (Siri makes an appearance) and sometimes the end user, the author or perhaps the reader. A section describing consent forms (optional, but not really) is followed by sections on the inhumane conditions of factory work, facts woven in with musings. And at the end, poet and reader are horrifically complicit: "I pick it up // forgive me // I pick it up". 

After reading the poem, I wasn't surprised to find in the notes that Gewirtz is a historian. He writes, "This poem responds to the extraordinary collection Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, edited by Qin Xiaoyu and translated by Eleanor Goodman. ... The experience workers--and the intimate connection to their exploitation of every person who wears 'Made in China' clothing or texts on an iPhone--is almost wholly absent from mainstream conversations in the United States, even though those workers' labor has reshaped our world."

Eagerly Awaiting the Paperback Release

I did my taxes. Yes, a whole six+ days before the original deadline and more than a month before the extended deadline. Anyway, I'm blaming that small burst of effort for my current desire to go cuddle up in bed with a volume of medieval historical fiction. In other words, I don't feel like writing an involved post.

So I thought it could be fun to mention some of the books I've recently wishlisted or that the Great Amazon Algorithm has recommended to me recently. I can't say much because I haven't read them yet.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton: The Algorithm recommended this one. The description makes it sound kind of like a mash-up of Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age and Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones and the Six. I mean, I want writers to make that hardcover money, but I can't help wishing for paperback initial releases.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz. I can't wait to learn more about Catalhoyuk, and while I've
read a few recent articles on Cahokia, I'm looking forward to Newitz's take. (Her novel, Autonomous, by the way, is a lot of fun and packed with ideas.) The Angkor section should also be illuminating; Pompeii doesn't seem quite so exciting in this company, but it should be interesting to compare the Roman city with other models.

The Murderbot novellas were highly entertaining, so I'm ready to check out the two (so far) sequel novels, Network Effect and Fugitive Telemetry.  Martha Wells hasn't let me down yet.

Karen Tidbeck's short story collection Jagannath was weird and powerful. Her dystopia Amatka was an unsettling page-turner. I know her new novel, The Memory Theater, is sure to be one of a kind, but the description alludes to a fairytale/fantasy realm setting that really heightens my anticipation.

The Best American Poetry 2020, Part II

I thought it was time to read another batch of poems. Many of the poems in this set shared themes of grief or illness. Victoria Chang's long narrow prose poem "Obit" echoes the shape of a tombstone. She writes of visiting her mother's gravesite after a stranger has been buried nearby:

                                      ...Before this other
stone appeared, my mother's stone was
still my mother because of the absence
around her. The appearance of the new
stone and the likeness to her stone
implied my mother was a stone, too, that
my mother was buried under the stone
too. ...

Ama Codjoe's "Becoming a Forest" at first feels like just a vivid imagining of the title--"in my marrow/the blood of sap, the rungs of pinecones"--but becomes more freighted with meaning: "...a cry, to be anything buzzing with blood/or wings, anything alive, including grief, because/isn't that ... what my long ago dead dreamed,/ tossed in their short allowance of night?"

William Brewer writes of peeling an orange on a airplane but connects it to Agent Orange, to herbicides and industrial waste and his father's cancer. Timothy Donnelly writes of his own cancer treatment, juxtaposed with news headlines of 2018, especially war-related violence in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, countries where the United States' foreign policy decisions directly or indirectly contribute to the death toll. Amidst this juxtaposition, there is this (perhaps even sublime) moment:

...I dropped a fossilized trilobite in the toilet

and it cracked in half. Millions of years of structural integrity
finished just like that. ...

In his contributor note, Donnelly elaborates: "The point isn't, of course, to compare personal suffering with suffering that takes place on a much greater scale and with far more complex implications, but rather to reflect on how both kinds of suffering will happen simultaneously, with the former sometimes distracting our attention from the latter in a way that is no less problematic for being kind of inevitable. The poem tries to widen its circumference in order to accommodate as much knowledge as it can, even to the point of documenting items of no apparent consequence, but it does so in the hope of keeping everything it remembers, even the merest debris of a life, from folding into oblivion. I have come to think of this as one of the two most important tasks a poem can set out to do."

The Old Drift

I was anticipating I'd have a lot to blog about after finishing The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, a weighty tome that tells a story about the history of Zambia, wound through with a multi-generational family saga, and ultimately flirting with science fiction. The truth is, though I found it interesting, I'm not sure I liked the book. It's not that the characters weren't likable--some were quite unlikable, but I still was able to sympathize with them and wish for their success (OK, I lost my goodwill for a couple of the men, but only in their later years; even the men I resented most were mostly likable as boys and youth). It took me some time to get into, perhaps because--after a striking preface voiced by a mosquito swarm, which returns chorus-like at transitions throughout the novel--the first section is told from the point of view of one of the early English colonizers, complete with dense language and saturated with racism. In the afterward, Serpell reveals that much of the detail comes directly from the real autobiography of Percy M. Clark. I read many books that include a family tree at the beginning, but in few does the visual impact my reading as much as this one did while I was reading The Old Drift--it captures not all, but most, of the interactions between the three focal families, and in some instances it assures the reader that characters, often in dicey circumstances, live long enough to have children. I wonder if I would have experienced the pace of the novel differently if I hadn't known who was going to survive (and, in some cases, hook up). Knowing that the author is Zambian, I was surprised that so many of the focus characters are white; some explanation for this comes from the "swarm": "This is the story of a nation--not a kingdom or a people--so it begins, of course, with a white man." It makes me wonder how Serpell would tell the story of a kingdom or a people.

Perhaps one of the elements that kept me at a bit of a remove was the lack of sentimentality--despite the many connections that are made over three-plus generations and more than a century--there is a dearth of romance. The characters are often aimless and self-deluded; even where there is drama (or even melodrama or elements of allegory--I think of the perplexing figure of Sibilla and of the Weepers), there is seldom a straightforward hero. This is a book told over time but deeply skeptical of "progress"; by its end, great changes have taken place, but the implications for individuals or the greater groups/swarms to which they may belong remain murky and up for discussion.

Eh, not feeling super inspired. Hate to break the streak, though, so here goes. I was feeling somewhat inspired over the weekend when I finished this journal page, partly inspired by an Effy Wild Moonshine painting and partly inspired by reading Jungian interpretations of fairytales.

My recent fairytale reading has primarily been through The Water of Life: Russian Tales in Jungian Perspective by Nathalie Baratoff. (One nice feature is that she discusses the cover painting in her preface). The book includes seven Russian fairytales, as collected by Alexandar Afanas'yev, each followed by Baratoff's analysis where she explores how the figures of the tale represent aspects of the psyche and their relationships to each other. There is definitely something a little different about the Russian fairytales, although the analyses often hit the same beats as von Franz's or Neumann's analysis of Greco-Roman myth. There's a lot of Baba Yaga. In some ways, women seem more present in these tales,

although most of the them do follow the coming-of-age adventures of male youth (the exception is "The Feather of Finist, the Bright Falcon." And, while "Mar'ya Morevna" actually focuses on Ivan Tsarevich, Mar'ya still has a compelling presence, casually slaying an army off-screen). Surprisingly, there's one fairytale that ends with the two heroes eaten by lions (and this is the tale that, to me, had echoes of Arthurian romance, particularly Gawain's quests). Sometimes we're just not ready/able to integrate some of the unconscious elements may be the moral of that one--don't worry, most end with some version of a hieros gamos.

Ring Shout

Last week I wrote about reading Charlaine Harris' Gunnie Rose books. I was thinking about what other books I would compare them to. Although they're not really that urban (perhaps with the exception of San Diego-set The Russian Cage), I think they're similar in tone to other urban fantasies, Seanan McGuire's October Daye and Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series, for example.

The alt-history and Old West vibes call to mind Cherie Priest. Also Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory books. It seems like there's been an increase in contemporary Westerns and alt-Westerns--in part, I think, combatting a historic whitewashing of the Western genre and depicting a more diverse and often more accurate landscape. Karen Memory, for example, brings in as a character Bass Reeves, the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River.

One recent alternate history standout is Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. It's one of Tor's novellas, and it packs it  powerful punch in under 200 pages. It features a sharpshooting female protagonist, Maryse Boudreaux, and her crew of women fighters, combatting the literally monstrous ku kluxes, a supernatural threat embedded within the Klan. WWI is over and veterans have returned to a country still marred by racial violence, with Birth of a Nation playing as a recruitment message for the KKK. Maryse and her crew work with the community effort led by Gullah wisewoman Nana Jean to harness the power of the ring shout to combat the power of the kluxes.

The action of Ring Shout is dense, but it introduces a compelling cast, several action sequences, harrowing encounters with a despicable villain, spiritual journeying, moral dilemmas, dubious bargains, and a climactic mountain-top battle with worldwide stakes. It draws heavily on horror (much more so than I prefer, although it's appropriate to the subject matter; while I'm not very well versed in Lovecraft or the contemporary responses to his mythos, I'm sure there are parallels with some of them, likely including Lovecraft Country) and is deeply steeped in African and African American traditions.

Sidenote: Katherine Hazzard-Donald's Mojo Workin' gives an interesting nonfiction perspective on the role of ring shout in "the old African American hoodoo system," along with many other aspects of hoodoo.  

Weird and Wondrous

Kind of a low-key day. I felt enjoyably productive yesterday & kind of anticipated more of the same today, but instead I basically just loafed around.

Anyway, in honor of Easter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to blog about two recent reads that really embodied a "sense of wonder," Flames and The Rain Heron by Tasmanian writer Robbie Arnott. Both are pretty unique: language on the literary side; I suppose I'd label them "magic realism" if I really had to pick a label. Both set in Tasmania (or some version of it), both paying close attention to nature and to human nature.

Flames begins:

Our mother returned to us two days after we spread her ashes over Notley Fern Gorge. She was definitely our mother--but, at the same time, she was not our mother at all. Since her dispersal among the fronds of Notley, she had changed. Now her skin was carpeted by spongy, verdant moss and thin tendrils of common filmy fern. Six large fronds of tree fern had sprouted from her back and extended past her waist in a layered peacock tail of vegetation. And her hair had been replaced by cascading fronds of lawn-colored maidenhair--perhaps the most delicate fern of all.

This kind of thing wasn't uncommon in our family.

It does not get less strange from there. The next chapter powerfully tells the story of a hunter, a man who bonds to and swims with a seal to hunt tuna. While the novel ultimately centers around the brother and sister children of the fern woman, each chapter is told from a different point of view, ranging from a hard-boiled woman detective to a river god in the form of a rakali water-rat, as the story itself ranges across Tasmania before returning to Notley Fern Gorge.    

Flames seems timeless in some ways but is set in the present day. The Rain Heron is set in a post-apocalyptic near future (although perhaps "apocalypse" is a bit strong; life goes on, in its way, perhaps "post-coup"). A troop of soldiers is sent to a rural mountain-top, to hunt down a woman who is said to know the location of the mythic bird. If The Rain Heron or the myth/folktale at its heart has a moral, it's not a clear or simple one. It is, in part, a story about choosing violence and choosing nonviolence.